Online RSVP for Private Events

Online RSVP for Private Events

1. Introduction

Ensuring the secrecy of your private events can be challenging. With the existence of many different communication channels available online, any private event link could be shared easily -— and very quickly. This can be a barrier for some event organizers to list their events online, simply out of fear that uninvited guests may add themselves to the list of attendees.

This Success Solution takes a look at how GEVME can be the RSVP solution for your private event, preventing the registration of attendees outside your guestlist, while having your event hosted online to simplify your invitation and RSVP process for prospective guests.

2. Create an Online RSVP Event in GEVME

Start by creating an event in GEVME, defining the event URL you want guests to access and submit their responses. By having your private event online, it will save your guests a lot of time when responding through email, thus releasing you from all the unnecessary paperwork and calling just to confirm attendance. All they have to do is select Yes or No to confirm their attendance status.

Once you have your event ready, be sure to change the Privacy setting of your event to Private — Invitation Only. This way, only guests who have received your event invitation email can RSVP for the event, preventing any unwanted entries into your guestlist.

3. Import Your Attendees’ List

Next up: importing your attendees’ list online. First, customize your Attendee form fields to capture the information you are about to import. This information will be used to prepopulate the RSVP Forms later on.

After collating the list of guests you wish to invite to your private event, compile them in a .csv file and import the list into GEVME. From our platform, you will be able to send event invitation emails easily, have them RSVP and automatically confirm their attendance within the system. For those that did not respond, you would be able to easily track them.

4. Customize Your RSVP Yes Form

Before you send your event invitations, make sure your forms are properly customized and ready to receive the responses your guests will give.

Go into Forms under Event Settings and customize the Attendee form. This is the form that guests who RSVP Yes will see. Add the relevant form fields to capture the information you need — but more importantly, prepopulate these fields from your invitees database that share the same fields in the Invitee form. This will save a great amount of time for your guests, giving them more incentive to respond as their personal particulars have already been filled in by GEVME.

5. Prepare Your RSVP No Form

As much as we would want all guests to RSVP Yes, we have to be prepared for the No outcome. GEVME comes with a prebuilt RSVP No form that you can also customize, allowing you to capture reasons for why a guest is not attending etc. Gain insights into how your future events can be optimized and improved, encouraging a bigger turnout the next time.

6. Allow Guests to Update Responses

Depending on your event’s guidelines, you can also enable the option to allow guests to update their particulars after responding.

Should a guest change his or her mind, he or she will be able to switch their responses from Yes to No, or vice versa. Customize the user experience further by displaying messages appropriate to the response, giving a sense of personalization, and also showing that you as an event organizer care about your guests.

7. Send RSVP-Ready Invitation Emails

GEVME comes with a set of readymade email templates which you can quickly customize and send out. Yes and No responses are automatically built into the template, saving you the time in creating an RSVP specific email from scratch.

Each response will lead to its own registration form and acknowledgement, allowing you to collect different sets of data, or display messages specific to each response.

8. Attendee Data Management

With the responses collected after the invitation period, you can go into GEVME’s Attendees module and analyze the data you have collected from your guests.

From the Grid, you can easily segment your data into lists according to the different fields you have specified. Some examples of segments you can create are:

Guests who responded ‘Yes’

Guests who responded ‘No’

Guests who left a reason for responding ‘No’

Guests who updated their responses

And more.

By filtering out these segments using Smart Lists or Static Lists, you can better understand the information you have, deriving actionable insights that allow you to improve your next event. You can also better understand what works, and what doesn’t.

9. Reporting

To better help you with your event analysis, generate reports within GEVME to have an in-depth look into both your event and attendee data. Export CSV reports to share them with your team, allowing for easy collaboration and team analysis.

10. Conclusion

Creating a private event online does not necessarily mean the end of secrecy. With GEVME, you can create your RSVP event online, confirm attendance and also interact with your guests easily — all on one platform.

The best part?

Only your invited guests can gain access to your online event. No one else.